Isabelle Baraffe
French physicist and academic
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Through James Webb Space Telescope
Early life and education
Baraffe was born in France. She completed her master's degree in physics at the Paris Diderot University. She remained there for her doctoral research, studying jointly at the University of Göttingen. Her research considered the evolution of non-metallic stars. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and the University of Göttingen.
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Research and career
Baraffe joined the École normale supérieure de Lyon.? She moved to the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon as a professor of astrophysics. In 2010, Baraffe joined the University of Exeter. Her research considers stellar hydrodynamics and exoplanets. Barafee has developed theoretical models to explore low mass stars and substellar objects, including brown dwarfs and exoplanets. The scientific community first became interested in low mass stars after the first report of brown dwarfs in 1995 (Gliese 229b), and Baraffe's reference models were used to create plans for observations. Baraffe pioneered the theoretical foundations of exoplanets, and her calculations have been used to understand observational data from the James Webb Space Telescope and Extremely Large Telescope.
She developed numerical tools that combine computational approaches with complex physics to study the dynamics of astrophysics. Her three-dimensional code MUSIC (MUlti-dimensional Stellar Implicit Code) can predict fundamental astrophysical processes and was awarded two European Research Council grants. She developed the field of asteroseismology – the use of pulsation modes to investigate the study of the inside of stars.